Adrian Kinderis CEO of ARI Registry Services made the claim as follows:

Will a new TLD web address automatically be favoured by Google over a .com equivalent? Quite simply, yes it will.

Wow! How can people spread such misinformation (I better be careful, I am sure I said things that weren't true as well). But seriously, this?

I am glad Matt Cutts called him out. Matt wrote:

Sorry, but that's just not true, and as an engineer in the search quality team at Google, I feel the need to debunk this misconception. Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don't expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn't bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that's your choice, but you shouldn't register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you'll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.

I hate when I hear people talk about proven SEO methods that they read from some marketing magazine, blog or even places like NY Times and claim it to be true because it was written. Something like this hurts the industry.

One thing, this is a great way for someone to lose his reputation as being an expert in anything. You said something so concret as fact and then a Google representative who knows the algorithm says you are absolutely wrong - well, that has to hurt your reputation.

What makes it worse is that he claims to have been "researching this topic" for about 6 years. Amazing.